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US Macro Collapses To 11-Month Lows, 88% Of Data Has Missed In February Despite the total and utter cognitive dissonance of talking-heads on mainstream media channels, the US economic data is not 'strong', is not 'goldilocks', is not 'decoupled', is not 'solid'. In fact, it's absolutely terrible. Bloomberg's US Macro data indicator which tracks both beats-and-misses and improvement/deterioration in data - is at 11-month lows. February alone has seen 29 data items miss expectations (from retail sales to industrial production)with only 4 data points beating expectations (including the constantly revised nonfarm payrolls data which so many hang their hat on)....

February 18, 2015 Jeff_Clark Some of you may be aware that investment guru Harry Dent has publicly stated that gold will fall to $250-$400. He specifically predicted: Around $700/ounce is a certainty in gold by 2015 to 2016, and $250 is a possibility well down the line by 2020–2023. His forecast is largely based on his belief that deflation will prevail. Governments are fighting deflation. If government stimulus fails, we will have deflation, not inflation. (snip) As a gold analyst who’s spent every day of the last seven-plus years watching this market, I can’t let this pass. I’m sure gold...

A group of divers in Israel has stumbled upon the largest hoard of gold coins ever discovered in the country. The divers reported the find to the Israel Antiquities Authority, and nearly 2,000 coins dating back to the Fatimid period, or the eleventh century, were salvaged by the authority’s Marine Archaeology Unit. The find was unearthed from the seabed of the ancient harbor in Caesarea National Park, according to a press release from the Israel Antiquities Authority. “The discovery of such a large hoard of coins that had such tremendous economic power in antiquity raises several possibilities regarding its presence...

On Tuesday morning, a plane owned in trust by the Bank of Utah showed up in a very visible area of the Mehrabad Airport in Tehran, the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran. What was it doing there exactly? Nobody knows, reports The New York Times. Under President Barack Obama, the United States has eased some of the long-standing punitive economic sanctions against Iran. Still, very little American — or European — economic activity is allowed inside the religious theocracy. The Bank of Utah is certainly no Wells Fargo. The Ogden-based community bank has all of 13 branches including...

Archdiocese of Washington From Magi to Wise Men – A Homily for Epiphany By: Msgr. Charles PopeThere are so many wonderful details in the Epiphany story: the call of the Gentiles, the nations, and their enthusiastic response, the significance of the star they see, and the gifts they bring, the dramatic interaction with Herod and their ultimate rejection of him in favor Christ.In this meditation I would like especially to follow these Magi, in their journey of faith to become wise men. As Magi, they followed the faint stars, distant points of light; as Wise Men they follow Jesus who...

This is not the first time the gold standard has been seen as the ultimate cure for Russia’s economic problems. In September 1998, the noted economist Jude Wanninski predicted in a far-sighted essay for The Wall Street Journal that only a gold ruble would get the the country out of its then-debt crises. It was upon taking office about two years later, in May 2000, that President Putin embarked upon the country’s massive gold-buying campaign. At the time, it took twenty-eight barrels of crude just to buy an ounce of gold. The gold-backed ruble policy of those years was adopted...

A herdsman in China’s remote far west has struck gold after stumbling upon a huge nugget of the precious metal estimated to be worth at least $250,000, state media reported Thursday. The 7.85 kilo chunk was discovered “practically lying on bare ground”, the official Xinhua news agency said, quoting the herder, an ethnic Kazakh named Berek Sawut. He found the golden lump, described in the report as “random-shaped” and about 23 centimetres long, 18 centimetres at its widest and up to eight centimetres thick. It was estimated to be worth 1.6m yuan ($255,000), Xinhua said, assuming it was 80 percent...

Gold prices fell Tuesday, as hopes for an imminent resolution between the new Greek government and its creditors tempered demand for the safe-haven metal. Gold for April delivery, the most actively traded contract, closed down $16.60, or 1.3%, at $1,260.30 a troy ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. A Greek official said Tuesday that Athens was working on a "road plan" to lessen the burden of his country's hefty debt pile, and he hoped to have an agreement with Greece's creditors by the beginning of June. The comments led some traders to sell gold, which...

President Obama’s actions in Libya were already suspicious for a number of reasons. First, during Obama’s presidential campaign, he asserted that his priority was to get America out of the two wars it was already fighting. Second, Obama was a staunch critic of the Bush administration for unconstitutionally embarking on a war without congressional approval — an action of which President Obama is now guilty. Finally, as the economy is teetering on collapse, one would assume the last thing the President would want is to have to fund a third war. And yet here we are. However, once we delve...

FDR, the man who studied Mussolini, who birthed the current intrusive state, who started the drug war in earnest, who put Japanese Americans into concentration camps, who extended the Depression years longer than it needed to be and thereby contributed to the genesis of the Second World War, who tried to pack the Supreme Court, who gave away half of Europe to the Soviets at Yalta, and who confiscated the gold – the real wealth – of the American people. What a guy. And he still has his face on the dime. There is a reason why my grandmother, a...

Tyler Durden 01/23/2015 Submitted by John Rubino via Dollar Collapse blog Yesterday the European Central Bank acknowledged that the currency it manages is being sucked into a deflationary vortex. It responded in the usual way with, in effect, a massive devaluation. Eurozone citizens have also responded predictably, by converting their unbacked, make-believe, soon-to-be-worth-a-lot-less paper money into something tangible. They’re bidding gold up dramatically.(snip)

Poachers kill 300 Zimbabwe elephants with cyanide • Cyanide has been used to kill 300 elephants in Zimbabwe's biggest nature reserve - three times the original estimate - as new photos show the scale of the slaughter Poachers in Zimbabwe have killed more than 300 elephants and countless other safari animals by cyanide poisoning, The Telegraph has learned. The full extent of the devastation wreaked in Hwange, the country's largest national park, has been revealed by legitimate hunters who discovered what conservationists say is the worst single massacre in southern Africa for 25 years. Pictures taken by the hunters, which...

Obama Donor Helped Free Terrorist Behind Benghazi Attack January 8, 2014 by Daniel Greenfield The left is rushing to blame Bush for the Benghazi attack, now that the State Department is moving to name a former Gitmo detainee released by Bush as a key figure in the attack. But Gitmo detainees were released as part of a pressure and lawfare campaign by the radical pro-terrorist left. Including Obama’s backers. The left-wing organization that helped spring Qumu was the Center for Constitutional Rights. Last April, the group issued an indignant press release painting Qumu as a harmless victim and blasting those...

The German central bank, or Bundesbank, said Monday that it stepped up the repatriation of its gold reserves from overseas storage last year. “The Bundesbank successfully continued and further stepped up its transfers of gold,” the central bank said in a statement. “In 2014, 120 tonnes of gold were transferred to Frankfurt from storage locations abroad: 35 tonnes from Paris and 85 tonnes from New York.” Germany’s gold reserves are the second-biggest in the world after those of the United States and totaled 3,384.2 tonnes this month, according to the latest data compiled by the World Gold Council. …

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — A shocking move by the Swiss National Bank sent the dollar reeling and propelled gold to close at its highest level in four months Thursday. In mid-morning European trading hours, Switzerland’s central bank scrapped its long-standing floor against the euro, which sent the Swiss franc EURCHF, +1.76% soaring against the euro and the dollar USDCHF, +1.74% The central bank also cut its interest rate on sight deposits to a negative 0.75%. When the dollar falls, gold prices tend to push higher.

Kurt H. Becker, a professor in the Department of Applied Physics and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and WeiDong Zhu, a research associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, are helping develop a new colloidal gold test strip for cardiac troponin I (cTn-I) detection. The new strip uses microplasma-generated gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) and shows much higher detection sensitivity than conventional test strips. The new cTn-I test is based on the specific immune-chemical reactions between antigen and antibody on immunochromatographic test strips using AuNPs. Compared to AuNPs produced by traditional chemical methods, the surfaces of the...

providers of its core computing infrastructure to shut down operations. The selloff, which appears to have been exacerbated when Asian traders were forced to meet collateral demands under margin trading rules, left bitcoin down 14.49% at $194.04 in the late New York morning Wednesday, following a 15.02% plunge Tuesday, according to news service Coindesk. The digital currency is now down 39% from Dec. 31 alone and is off 83% from the all-time high of $1,165 that it hit at the end of a furious rally in November 2013. ... On Monday, CEX.io, a company that mines bitcoins on behalf of...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is prepared to let Greece leave the eurozone if Greeks elect a government that jettisons the country’s current austerity course, according to German media reports. The report in the Der Spiegel daily, which cited sources close to the German government, comes as polls show a radical leftist party leading the field three weeks ahead of a snap election in Greece. The Syriza party of Alexis Tsipras has pledged to reverse reforms imposed by Greece’s international creditors and renegotiate its bailout deal. …

Do you want to know if the stock market is going to crash next year? Just keep an eye on junk bonds. Prior to the horrific collapse of stocks in 2008, high yield debt collapsed first. And as you will see below, high yield debt is starting to crash again. The primary reason for this is the price of oil. The energy sector accounts for approximately 15 to 20 percent of the entire junk bond market, and those energy bonds are taking a tremendous beating right now. This panic in energy bonds is infecting the broader high yield debt market,...

Using GPS and state-of-the-art sonar, Columbia University researchers recently made the first comprehensive map of the wonders submerged in New York City's harbors. Supplementing those findings with historical data, New York magazine reported the inventory's highlights in May: a 350-foot steamship (downed in 1920), a freight train (derailed in 1865), 1,600 bars of silver (unrecovered since 1903), a fleet of Good Humor ice cream trucks (which form a reef for aquatic life), and so many junked cars near the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges that divers use them as underwater navigation points. Of most concern lately, though, are the wildlife: 4-foot-long...